I've been attending church for a small amount of time and can't count how many people, mostly women, who felt judged and rejected by their former church family after they had a divorce. I know plenty of people have heard this before. Every Christian should know that the divorcee is accountable for their actions before GOD. Every Christian should know that it is their job to support their brothers and sisters and help them along the path to redemption when they fall.
What is behind this destructive epidemic within the church and does anyone have theories on how we can make it better?
What is behind it, is the mistaken historical stand of the church on divorce.
The New Testament has been viewed as a replacement of the Old Testament.
As if Christ came along and threw out all of the moral code of Moses, replacing it with a new, higher, better standard.
But when Jesus walked this earth, teaching among men, He did not do this in a vacuum.
He operated within a particular culture, and in a specific historical setting, and was responding to very specific forces at work in 1st-century Jewish culture.
When Jesus said, "Ye have heard it said by them of old time... but I say unto you...", He was not referring to Moses and the prophets! His intro to the Sermon on the Mount makes that crystal-clear.
Instead, "them of old time" were the founding rabbis of the Pharisee sect!
Jesus was pointing out how the teachings of those rabbis (and their Pharisee followers) fell far short of what the Old Testament actually said!
Every single one of those "but I say unto you" teachings are actually found in the Old Testament!
Every single one!
Jesus was bringing the Judaism of his day back to the moral code that God gave Moses at Mount Sinai.
But the Christianity of the Early Dark Ages saw the New Testament completely differently, as they began to persecute the Jews as "Christ-Killers." Instead of seeing Jesus through Jewish eyes, they saw Jesus as setting up a completely separate moral code.
And that's how the New Testament passages about divorce and remarriage came to be seen in such a twisted, deformed way.
Look at it this way...
Deuteronomy 24:1 and 2 gives an ORDER to any man who might wish to put his wife away. (Not that God wanted them to--which is how the Pharisees misread it--but that IF a man was going to throw his wife out, this was the order to HIM.) There was absolutely no allowance given for a man to kick his wife out, without giving her divorce papers. No separation without divorce papers.
And the reason for those divorce papers is clear in verse 2. And when she is departed, she may go and be the wife of another man. God's permission: "she may."
Now, in that passage, it goes on to describe how God viewed breaking up with a second husband, in order to remarry the first one: He called it an
abomination.
Abomination!
The divorce was not the abomination.
The remarriage was not the abomination.
The only act in the entire sorry scenario was to go back to the original marriage partner.
Which is precisely what the anti-divorce-and-remarriage churches require!
Now, I ask you...
Would Jesus ever turn something His Father once decreed an abomination, into a New Testament command?
If He
had--! Then it would have been utterly earth-shaking for the early church. It would have been a major doctrine, and would have gotten a lot of attention in the epistles.
Every law-abiding Jew would have gone through a major shift, in throwing out the old moral code, and instead requiring the opposite of what God had decreed.
But the early church had no such problem. They kept right on keeping the law, until the Gentiles came in... and then said they didn't have to keep the Law as strictly as the Jewish church did. But not one word to them about forbidding remarriage after divorce. Not one word of all the divorce-and-remarriage situations needing to break up and get back with their original partners!
Not one word!
Which is HUGE.
Historians tell us that divorce and remarriage was extremely common in both Jewish and Gentile cultures. Greeks and Romans divorced and remarried often, sometimes yearly. It was actually against Roman Law, for citizens to remain divorced longer than 2 years. The penalty for remaining unmarried after divorce was that if your neighbor reported you for not remarrying, he could take up to half of your assets!
Therefore, the early church was FULL of divorced-and-remarried couples.
And Paul said not one word about them needing to split.
Not one word.
